Two things that will make you an outlier as an engineer

What are your thoughts on remote work? (aka. will it stay or would go back to normal?)

Composer is unapologetically, unequivocally remote first. We were “born” during the very start of Covid, so we’ve always been fully remote. Being remote allows us to have a far greater talent pool; we believe talent is evenly distributed, but opportunity isn’t. 

Remote definitely isn’t perfect. The single biggest challenge is that the informal communication network that develops naturally in-office needs much more deliberate nurturing in a remote context.

I don’t think we’re going back to normal anytime soon - or ever. Workers decide where they work in this competitive, very tight labor market. And workers don’t want to go back to normal.

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What are the traits of successful engineers?

There are really just two things that will make you an outlier as an engineer:
1. Knowing the fundamentals cold, e.g. things like algorithms and data structures AND

2. Actually working hard.

Number 2 is becoming rarer and rarer, largely thanks to the influence of big tech “rest and vest” culture. If you own projects end to end, even if things out of your control hamper them, you will become indispensable. So much of what needs to get done in companies involves schlep work - unglamorous tasks that are still necessary. If you take on these tasks and make other people’s lives easier, your colleagues will love you, your boss will love you, and your customers will love you.

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The cool thing is that neither of these two traits requires any sort of rare, inborn talent. But the combination of the two is rare nonetheless. 

What inspired you to start Composer?

After leaving my last company, I had some downtime to finally figure out what to do with my savings. I was shocked to find out how limited off-the-shelf retail offerings were. And I also knew too much: I knew that high net worth individuals had access to way better strategies than what I could access. I simply refused to accept inferior risk-adjusted returns because I didn’t have access to an exclusive club, so I went about hacking my own solution that imitated the strategies of some well known hedge funds.

My hacked together strategies were intended to be little more than a side project at the time. But then I started writing about my strategies, just to be able to share what I was doing with friends and family. Much to my surprise, my friends wanted to invest in my strategies right away. I told them that simply wasn’t possible without me going through a ton of headaches, and I just wasn’t set out to be an investment adviser. 

Instead, I created a Slack group where I shared my trades via a slack bot. The validation came when my friends would complain when my slack bot would break. The whole process of developing, backtesting, and deploying strategies was incredibly difficult, even for simple strategies. It became very evident that there was a giant gap between what people wanted to access and what they could reasonably implement. Composer aims to fill that gap.

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How did you get into fin tech?

I have zero institutional background in finance. I just see markets as a fun intellectual challenge, since they are mostly - but not entirely - efficient. And I love approaching problems in traditional finance from more of a product, design, and data science perspective. If you enjoy learning and solving problems, you can pick up on any new skill sets and get into any industry.

Composer is hiring Backend Engineers

Build the infrastructure powering our automated portfolio management platform!

Composer is a no-code platform for automated investment management. Composer allows you to build, test, deploy, and manage automated investing strategies - all without writing a line of code.

Apply Here!